“Her Way, His Way”
Andrew LaMar Hopkins in conversation with Clementine Hunter
Curated by Alison M. Gingeras
Opening: May 2, 2026
Encore Reception: June 6, 2026 from 5-8pm
Orleans Gallery 603 Julia St | New Orleans
Orleans Gallery is proud to present Her Way, His Way, a landmark exhibition placing the work of Andrew LaMar Hopkins in direct and deliberate conversation with that of Clementine Hunter: two of the most vital artistic voices to emerge from the cultural soil of Louisiana. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras—Curator at Large at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and curator of Hopkins’ debut exhibition Creolité at Venus Over Manhattan, Painting Is Painting's Favorite Food: Art History as Muse, and Pictures Girls Make: Portraitures at Blum Los Angeles and at TEAFA. The new exhibition opens May 2, 2026, marking the one-year anniversary of Orleans Gallery.
This exhibit is a dialogue across time, lived experience, and the complicated inheritance of the American South.
Clementine Hunter—the “Her”—is among the most revered American folk artists of the 20th century. Born into the realities of plantation life and remaining there her entire life, she painted what she knew and lived. Her “memory paintings,” rendered in a palette of startling brightness, document the rhythms of labor, faith, and community of the hard life of sharecropping with clarity and reverence. Her work endures in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution, a testament to a vision that transformed hardship into something beautiful, relatable, and profoundly human.
Andrew LaMar Hopkins—the “His”—is a world-renowned contemporary artist and antiquarian whose artistic practice is rooted not in observation of the present but in history and reconstruction. His paintings draw from his deep study of Creole culture, architecture, and lived histories, revisiting many of the same subjects Hunter once painted through a distinctly Creole lens. But, where Hunter painted from memory, Hopkins paints from pursuit: a reaching back toward histories that must be studied, preserved, and, at times, reassembled. Informed by both scholarship and imagination, Hopkins’ work now resides in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and will soon be exhibited at the curated 2026 Venice Biennale exhibition, Personal Structures organized by the European Cultural Center, affirming his place within the evolving canon of American art.
In Her Way, His Way, Hunter’s subjects of field labor, communal gatherings, and spiritual life, are not revisited so much as refracted through Hopkins’ Creole lens and own distinct style. The result is a dialogue that feels at once intimate and expansive. One artist lived the life. The other carries its echoes forward.
Presented on the occasion of Orleans Gallery’s one-year anniversary, the exhibition is both a celebration and a statement of intent and reflects the gallery’s ongoing commitment to situating Southern artists within a broader historical framework—one that recognizes the region not as peripheral, but as central to the American story.
This is a conversation that refuses to stay in the past.
Her Way, His Way opens May 2, 2026 at Orleans Gallery.
